Alt-right

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"Alt-right," a self-styled descriptor for many white-rights activists, has become intertwined with the terms white nationalism and white supremacy, said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

But Segal said "alt-left" is a "made-up term" used by people on the right to "suggest there is a similar movement on the left." But there's no equivalent with the anti-Semitic and bigoted groups that call themselves "alt-right," he said.

"Obviously, there are left-wing extremists, but there is no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right," Segal said.

That's not to say there aren't radical leftists who have engaged in violence. But they generally don't use the term "alt-left."

He cited a 2012 case in which activists "walked into a high-end restaurant in Chicago where a white supremacist group was eating and literally beat them up with baseball bats."

The term is used to define a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left -- often the far left -- but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform.

Antifa activists feel the need to get violent because "they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism atCalifornia State University, San Bernardino.

"There's this 'It's going down' mentality and this 'Hit them with your boots' mentality that goes back many decades," he added.

White supremacist

White supremacists see diversity as a threat. Segal said a popular white supremacist slogan is, "Diversity is a code word for white genocide."

Daryl Johnson, a former counterterrorism expert for the Department of Homeland Security, said recent policies are aligning with the wishes of white supremacists.

"The anti-immigration xenophobia is rising," said Johnson, owner of domestic terror monitoring group DT Analytics.

"US policy is becoming more isolationist -- the building of the (border) wall, the travel ban, mass deportations. These were ideas that I read about 10, 15 years ago on white supremacist message boards. Now they're being put forth as policy."

"An example of avoidance would be when you hear people say 'all lives matter' in response to the claim that 'black lives matter.' Obviously, all lives matter. But that's avoiding the issue," Pitts told CNN this week.

"... When we talk about racism, we're talking about systematized oppression, and in order to benefit from systematized oppression, you have to have the power."